If you think you could ever enjoy wine tasting… Go to Tiger Mountain Vineyards. Everything you could want in a wine tasting is there. $5 gets you a generous selection of wines, about a dozen or so. You also get free unlimited fruit, cheese, and bread, and they aren’t the cheap stuff. Delicious fresh goat cheese from the farm with dill was the cheese hi-light of my own excursion. Go on a Saturday and there will probably be a live Irish folk or bluegrass band jamming away in the corner.

The main reason to go is the wines themselves. Tiger Mountain produces bold, experimental concepts in wine that seem completely crazy, but gosh darn it, they work. A white wine that’s actually super smokey. Red wines made from late grapes with earthy undertones of berries that are still dry, rich, and meaty. A dessert white wine made with no sugar other than what’s in the grape that’s so sweet it’s like candy, yet gentle to the tongue and vibrant. A dry sparkling white wine made with flowers that actually tastes like a bouquet of wild flowers smells. They mix the wines up season to season and are always trying new things, but some of my favorites that they always have are the Rabun Red and the the Mountain Cyn.

The Rabun Red is a precise blend of four of their pure reds with some slight hints of fruit, and despite the fruit, the flavor is actually savory, spicy, and full. The Rabun Red is designed primarily for Italian dishes as I understand, but the flavor is so subtle and complex that I’d take it by itself, take small sips, throw it to the back of the palette, and swoosh it around. Good stuff.

The Mountain Cyn is a more serious wine. It’s made from one grape, the flavor is bold and forward, and really it just kicks your mouth’s ass. You taste it and you say, “Wow, that’s aggressive.” Then, the aftertaste kicks in. The aroma flows up from your mouth into your nostrils. You feel something in your mouth that’s like sitting in front of a fire in a log cabin on a snowy mountain day. Then you pick up your glass, smile at the audacious creation, and say, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

Tiger Mountain Vineyards has a quaint, colorful, local small town charm. The atmosphere combined with the extraordinary wine tasting is guaranteed to make any bitch think you’re much deeper and more sophisticated than you really are, and that’s what wine tastings are all about. $5 to make a bitch fawn is pretty darn cheap in our crushing inflationary times.